Years ago I had a computer with an Iomega Zip drive, which I used to copy files from my home to my office computer. Having retired, I am catching up on my computer projects and have found three Zip disks, but I no longer have a PC that can read them.Margaret Brewster

There are still some external Zip drives around that you could plug into your current PC's USB port. You might be able to borrow one from a friend, or find one via a local computer club, or something similar. If that approach fails, you could buy one on eBay.co.uk for £20-£30, then sell it again after transferring the data. Or there are companies that offer data recovery and file transfer services, such as Apex Technology. However, the data recovery market deals mainly with commercial companies who may be desperate to recover important data and are less worried about the cost.

Web extra: By the way, Zip disks turned out to be less than perfect as an archival medium, rather than as a data transfer system (which is how you used yours), and Iomega was sued in the US over the "click of death" that affected some drives (PDF). If you run into this problem, retrieving your old data could turm out to be more trouble than it's worth.